November is a Flutter release month, but as I write this, the new stable version hasn’t landed just yet. No need to worry—it’s likely just around the corner.
In the meantime, I have a bunch of exciting news and updates from the Flutter community. Let’s dive right in! 🚀
Flutter News
This month, there have been some very interesting developments in the Flutter ecosystem. Here are the top stories. 👇
💙 Architecting Flutter Apps
Building scalable and maintainable apps starts with a solid app architecture, and I’ve written extensively on the topic (here and here). So I’m very happy to see the Flutter team address this with new official docs on app architecture.
These docs introduce concepts like separation of concerns, unidirectional data flow, and the MVVM design pattern. While there’s room for further expansion, they’re a great starting point for developers looking to build robust and scalable apps.
The Flutter team also released a well-structured sample app to demonstrate best practices, including multiple environments, brand-specific styling, and high test coverage. Check it out here:
💬 Flutter Forum
The brand-new Flutter Forum has quickly become one of my favorite places to hang out.
It features high-quality discussions, like these on full-stack Flutter architectures, responsiveness in Flutter, and lesser-known Dart classes, and many experienced Flutter devs have already joined.
Compared to Reddit, Discord, and all the other channels, this forum has a much better signal-to-noise ratio. Best of all, it’s free and public! 🙌
🦋 Flutter Community on Bluesky
On a related note, many Flutter developers are migrating from X to Bluesky. While I’m still posting on both platforms, Bluesky is becoming a great space for focused Flutter discussions, without the usual noise.
If you’re exploring Bluesky, I recommend these curated lists to get started:
📝 We’re Forking Flutter. This is Why.
A few weeks ago, Matt Carroll published this controversial post, announcing his decision to fork the Flutter framework, with the stated goal of “expanding Flutter's available labor, and accelerate development”.
The post talks about the “Flutter team's labor shortage”, why that's a problem, and how the community can help by contributing to a new Flutter fork called Flock.
While the concept has sparked debate, some developers are skeptical about its feasibility. For example, in this forum discussion, one commenter noted:
I don’t understand why you would consider swapping a fully funded team working on a very complicated project with what I can tell currently appears to be a team of two people mostly.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, and don’t see a realistic scenario where Flock can live up to its claims, but time will tell.
For now, you can read the original post here:
Flutter Videos
I haven’t shared any Observable Flutter episodes in a while, but two recent videos stood out to me, covering Image Filters and Mesh Gradients. If you’re into graphics and shaders, these are must-watches.
📹 Image Filters
In this episode, Raouf Rahiche explores Flutter’s built-in image filters, including:
- Implementing Android’s overscroll effect using shaders
- Examples of shaders ported from Metal and Skia to GLSL
- Blur filters, tile modes, and color filters (grayscale, sepia, etc.)
The episode also features a live coding session to create a "selective focus" effect, highlighting specific areas of an image. If you want to dive deeper into filters and shaders, give it a watch:
📹 Meshes and Gradients
In this episode, Renan Araujo introduces O’Mesh, the mesh gradient library he used to power this playground.
He explains how mesh gradients differ from traditional gradients, how to overcome shader limitations, and how Bézier curves are used to create distortions. A live coding session is also included, showing how to use the library in your projects:
Latest from Code with Andrea
Here’s what I’ve been up to this past month:
- New Course Module: as part of my Flutter in Production course, this module is about Releasing iOS apps on the App Store—it’ll be out soon!
- New Tips: as usual, you can find them here on my site.
- New Video: this is a guide about how to design your Flutter app icons in Figma.
- Course Updates: My Flutter Foundations and Flutter & Firebase courses are now updated with the latest package versions.
One More Thing
My Black Friday Sale will start on Monday 25th.
If you’ve been planning to get my courses, wait until then, as I'll be offering a big discount.
Other than that, I’ll continue to share new content as usual, including many new tips about the upcoming Flutter 3.27 release! 🗓️
Thanks for reading, and happy coding! 🎉
